Connecting with the right people at the right time takes strategy; strategy in your content and strategy to maximize your brand outreach. A marketing content strategy provides your company results across multiple platforms and in a variety of media content.
It can be easy for the planning stages of a marketing content strategy to feel overwhelming. But the effort you put in before implementation helps you clarify your goals and help ensure that your time isn’t wasted. Establishing the right balance of strong social media posts, email campaigns, blog posts, infographics, and video is complex. The pressure to continue to generate fresh and consistently great content can feel never-ending. Added to this, your budget can seem overstretched before you even get started. However, the rewards are massive for companies with an informed marketing content strategy.
With your success in mind, here are eight tips for putting together a strong marketing content strategy. Take charge of the power to deliver significant results to benefit your business.
1. Don’t Create Just for Creating’s Sake
With so many brands pushing out endless streams of content, it can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to keep up. But if you are creating content just for the sake of it, your efforts likely won’t generate the results you want. Instead, focus on what your audience wants and needs from you and what you can truly deliver. When you identify key issues important to your clientele, you can more easily create content that will capture their attention and keep it. Understanding your customers helps you set reachable goals and create content specific to those goals.
2. Communicate Your Core Values
Your marketing content is the proverbial first impression potential customers have of your company before they decide whether to spend money with you. Therefore, it is essential that you ensure that your content clearly communicates your core values; what you care about. Your messaging must maintain a consistent voice that feels natural and authentic to your brand.
Do not fall prey to the temptation to create generic content that you believe will have mass appeal. Instead, work to create unique content in which your brand is immediately recognizable renders higher returns. Impressive results over both short and long terms come when your brand stands out from the competition.
3. Demonstrate Your Knowledge, Expertise, and Insights
Markets are saturated with an unlimited selection of content to inform their consumer choices. So, it is vital that your marketing content delivers value that they cannot get anywhere else. Focus on creating content that showcases your expertise. Tailor your messaging to express what you know and how you are the best choice to meet their needs. The right balance will engage your audience.
4. Practice Non-Linear Storytelling
Storytelling provides brands with the opportunity to connect with audiences on an emotional level. However, the format and length of storytelling have changed over the years. Gone are the days of every narrative featuring a clear beginning, middle, and end. Now, communicating a single story across screens and platforms takes full advantage of the adage that one picture communicates a thousand words.
A marketing content strategy employing videos, infographics, gifs, memes and blog posts to specific sections of your audience ensures that your content resonates with as wide a constituency as possible. The diversity of media only helps reach more potential customers.
5. Consider Your Customer Journey
Mapping your customer journey will help you to determine precisely how, when and where to connect with your ideal audience. Consider the thoughts, emotions, and expectations that your audience will have at every touchpoint. Use this information to guide your content and deliver relevant, engaging material at the right times.
6. Consider Content Destination
There are a variety of platforms and channels available that you might want to incorporate into your marketing content strategy. Although it is important not to spread your efforts too thinly, you should be targeting potential customers on a range of platforms that you know your audience likes to use.
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Always understand where your content will be published. This will allow you to tailor your output to each platform. Creating content that is relevant to the environment and context in which it will be published will make it far more effective and more likely to resonate with your audience.
7. Consider Evergreen Content
Many businesses begin their marketing content with either too many or too few ideas. In contrast, you must build evergreen content or content that is search-optimized and consistently relevant. Consider frequently asked customer questions or queries to help you to form a foundation of content that will continue to deliver value to your audience over time.
Start by considering broad themes your business hopes to address. From there, create a library of content that expounds on those themes. Focusing on evergreen content will help you to scale your marketing content library with pieces that can be repurposed again and again.
8. Discuss What Isn’t Being Discussed
If you want to make an impact with your content, the best approach may be to target a niche that is currently being underserved by your competitors. Adopting a forward-thinking approach is an excellent way to demonstrate that you are an innovative brand with unique insight. Starting a conversation can give you more visibility than simply contributing to existing discussions. Just be sure you have support from solid research for any statements you make.
